Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Curly Fleece 3 - stylized dialogue mouths

The selling point of the commercial is her "curly fleece" sweater and I had to figure out a way to design the lumps to suggest the texture of the fabric and make it differ from the dog's poodle fur. The differences are subtle and disappear after the magic happens because I got lost in the rest of the animation and forgot.After she'd been fwaffed, I then animated her head pretty much straight ahead for her dialogue.I also wanted a complete contrast to the way I animated the dog -even in the dialogue mouth shapes.His mouth shapes were extremely specific and detailed. Hers I wanted to be simple, graphic and cute. Like the great Gene Deitch Terrytoons Logo from the 1950s.I even had to note when to fill in her mouth with red and when to fill it in with white, which I wasn't sure would work, but it seemed to.It switches to pose to pose here, as she stretches her arms out, the mittens expand and then contract.Here's the whole scene in action:

really nice john, but why don't you try use www.vimeo.com to submit your vids, that way they will play on the spot in your blog. they will have loading bars and yeah jst looks swanky, i use it on myne and its really easy. all you do is copy and paste the embed code from the vimeo vid and paste it on the HTML add post thingy magigie.. but you probably already knew that =) great post btw, i'm of to read your solid construction stuff lol i need it

The red brings harmony (the other colors are yellow and orange) to the face. I think the power of her mouth is even more pronounced because the sweater is the complementary color of red. Also teeth along with the lips creates interesting shapes.

Kali, I'm almost certain that poodle's voice is provided by the wonderful Corey Burton, who also narrates those Old Navy commercials. He was also Ranger Smith in the two Yogi shorts John K. produced several years ago.